Likewise. Fortunately, Pucka is juuust far enough away over the Great Divide to qualify as not Melbourne...

Install the nVidia proprietary drivers for full 3D support and FlightGear works well. I'm a realist, use the tools that provide the best computing experience.

Would that it was that easy...

I tried the driver from the OEM website - ended up with nothing but a square white blob on the screen as a mouse pointer.

One re-install later...

Today I tried a solution found on the Fedora forums using the nvidia driver from rpmfusion supposedly for this install.

One very fuzzy screen and a maximum resolution of 640x480 (still without any 3D being recognised - but at least I still had an X-session) later, I'm back to the nv driver that comes with F11 and a 1024x768 resolution (2D only) that I can live with.

Nah! Not true. My daughter was starting to use computer with Window XP. She was quite frustrated with the internet speed as it always download updates, anti virus updates which make surfing the internet crawll like a snail. On top of that she has to learn how to defrag hard disk, clean registries and scan for virus. So she switch to Ubuntu and totally stuck with it.

Now she get back the internet speed she want. No learning on defrag hard disk, scan and kill virus and no clean up. With Ubuntu Software center, she can get the software that she want. I was quite surprise that she feel totally at home with Ubuntu. My daughter is the living prove that Linux can be as user friendly compare to Window and Mac.

For users Linux is far easier than Windows, as shown by my service clerks who have been using Linux (first Suse, then Ubuntu) quite happily for 5 years now, with no issues, (not the same for other users in the same office using windows). It is the tweakers that learned windows first that really struggle.

The sig between the asterisks is so cool that only REALLY COOL people can even see it!

I spend far to much of my work time fixing stupid problems with Windows (or not fixing and reinstalling), its always a relief to get home and find that the Linux machines are all still running and I can get on with things without fussing about malware, stupid registry errors, wirless drivers that need to be regressed through 3 generations before they'll work properly, endless updates gradually erroding the hard drive space. The list is almost endless.

My desktop machine has had a few updates, but has an uptime of 80+ days (which is about when I moved house) and simply works. My server is running just as well, and only has a shorter uptime because I needed to move to a smarter router. Oh, that runs Linux as well.....

As it is, the copy of Vaster that I keep for customer support has now become so fragile that I'll have to reload the idiot thing sometime in the next couple of week if it is to be of any use to anyone.

The biggest problem with windows migrants is that you can get away with very little real knowledge of Windows and most of the time, you may do things really badly, but you will(apparently) get away with it. (Almost always, later on you will end up regretting it).
Linux for users is excellent, for those who have been lulled into a false sense of competence by using Windows, it can be a bear trap, mainly because to tweak Linux, you actually do need to know what you are doing whereas if you crapout windows, you just reinstall it.

EDIT: just to make this clear:
user= someone who just uses a computer, never installs or reconfigures it, because they have a sysadmin to do that.
tweaker= someone who thinks that they know how to manage a computer, but generally reinstalls windows a lot, and usually ignores the sysadmin (if they have one).
sysadmin=someone who actually does know how to manage a computer.

The sig between the asterisks is so cool that only REALLY COOL people can even see it!

<rant>
It never ceases to amaze me how diehards for any one
OS call other OSs and say they never have problems with
their OS of choice.

Everyone has problems sooner or later no matter which
OS one uses and every OS has its quirks.

Windows works one way and Linux "flavours" work in others,
(note plural!), Apple systems work in yet another and Amiga
OSs, (current OS4.1), works differently yet again...

Just because Windows is proprietary does not mean it is all
bad - YES - it does have its bad points but let`s face it
Linux flavours are no better and I suspect Apple and AMIGA
OSs are the same.

Linux is not the be all and end all of computing life and as
85% of the worlds population uses Windows flavours it can`t
be all bad either.

To me Linux is a test bed for learning not productivity.
(None of you experts have told me how to directly read
in real time absolute address 0x417H in assembly yet,
but I CAN do this under Windows; so which is more "open"
to me then, eh!).

Sadly a command line seems to be HIGH priority for Linux
when confronted with, (often common), problems - I can
see my 80+ year old parents wanting to be bothered with
that, NOT - but Windows tries to keep the command prompt
out of sight - no bad thing in my eyes.

I can`t remember the last time I used a Windows command
prompt to help solve a HW problem - I do use it often for my
usage but not to solve a problem - but Linux is reliant on
this method - Lord help us, Linux is supposedly user friendly
but not when it comes to fault diagnosis.

This notebook, (HP Pavillion dv2036ea), is 4 years old
this week and has NEVER failed SW wise using XP to SP2,
I don`t use SP3.

Sadly the HW itself is failing.

So the XP OS is outliving this HW. Knoppix 5.1.1 was on
this at first but I switched to PCLinuxOS 2009 some time
ago but this still has its quirks.
</rant>

Bazza wrote:Sadly a command line seems to be HIGH priority for Linuxwhen confronted with, (often common), problems - I cansee my 80+ year old parents wanting to be bothered withthat, NOT

That is just stale old FUDNone of my users ever need it, and nor do I, generally.The only reason that I use it is from choice.I have to use DOS in Windows on a daily basis anyway.

Linux is supposedly user friendlybut not when it comes to fault diagnosis.

The biggest godsend for diagnosing faults is the log directory.

Just spent half a day trying to fault find an XPe based print/scan controller which doesn't even give an error (it just says "job completed", but the email never arrives).
It worked until last Tuesday, but the 2003 server is manually patched, and hasn't had any updates this month.
No debug mode, no logs.

Going back with a mailserver running on my laptop (Ubuntu) so that we can get some clues!

But I'll lay odds that it is the security software on the windows box.

The sig between the asterisks is so cool that only REALLY COOL people can even see it!

Bazza wrote:To me Linux is a test bed for learning not productivity.(None of you experts have told me how to directly readin real time absolute address 0x417H in assembly yet,but I CAN do this under Windows; so which is more "open"to me then, eh!).

Software, including operating systems, is supposed to make life/job easier and better. People have been "trained", mostly by Microsoft, that computers crash and that the fault lies with the hardware playing up and not talking to the software.